


thus always to tyrants

by bartonbones



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, could be read as platonic if you don't mind platonic forehead kisses, don't ask me how they survive because i don't understand and i won't answer, jyn and cassian compliment each other so well it EATS ME ALIVE, partial fix it fic, which you shouldn't because they're lovely and i love them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 13:04:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9182977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bartonbones/pseuds/bartonbones
Summary: Where I go, will you still follow?Will you leave your shaded hollow?OR: in which Jyn and Cassian survive.





	

**Author's Note:**

> thanks most to Tabitha who helped me make it sound legit, since all i know about star wars comes from the new films & the lego video games. title/line from the summary from "thus always to tyrants" by the oh hellos, which isn't quite a jyn/cassian song, but is good enough. please don't look too closely at my plot holes, they are vast and remain unfixed.

  
  


There is no place like war to realize that love is not a choice that you make. You make dozens of choices because of it, yes: you choose to sacrifice, you choose to admit fault, you choose to keep it. You do not choose who you get to choose to keep.

 

Jyn would not have chosen Cassian three weeks ago.

 

Three weeks ago, Jyn would not have looked any deeper into Cassian than what she could read on his clothing: a captain of an organization that barely remained organized, where doing the right thing was sometimes a punishment. She would not have chosen someone whose sense of self depended on dozens and hundreds of other people, on completed missions, on achievements and ribbons, fighting for a goal that moved every time you took a step closer to it. 

 

Jyn would not have chosen Cassian.

 

Cassian, Jyn was fairly sure, would not have chosen her.

 

Their motives fundamentally disagreed—they might travel on the same line for a few moments, but when they crossed, and they  _ would _ cross, there would be no room for either of them to sacrifice, and neither of them would. They were two rays of light, born from the same point, but fast in different directions. 

 

What ought to have happened was mutually assured destruction, at worst, and apathy, at best.

 

But you don’t get to choose who you can make choices for. 

 

* * *

 

Cassian was too selfless. At first Jyn thought it repulsed her—there was, of course, a time for empathy, a time to consider someone else’s safety above your own. It was what her mother had done. But different if it meant you were too selfless, lesser than a self, that there was nothing to you but your jacket’s medals.

 

At first she thought this repulsed her, but in a terrifying moment of self-reflection, she realized it intrigued her. It was magnetic: the idea you could be happy and proud just because you’d done what you were told. 

 

Or maybe it was because he had such tangible ways of knowing he was doing the right thing—someone to tell him so, a council to congratulate or admonish him, instead of sitting with a gun and a knife and a well-wish from someone who raised you for ten years and a crippling sense that you had no idea what the good thing was.

 

It is a lot easier to believe someone else’s morality than your own.

 

* * *

 

 

“They’re all gone,” says Cassian.

 

His voice is brittle but sure. They are all gone. Jyn pulled only him out, by the skin of her teeth, by the grip of her dirty, bloody fingernails on his dirty, bloody jacket. By one last selfish act born of self-regulated morality did she look into the universe, and—not for her quite entirely for own sake, or her own hurts—say,  _ you have taken enough _ . 

 

“Yes,” she says, carefully. They are all gone. “But you’re here.”

 

Cassian makes a sound, a sort of huff, laugh, pained gasp, and looks away. 

 

“They are all gone,” he says. His voice is quieter than before.

 

He feels so far from her, different than when he clung to her waist and let her carry him to a ship that left just in time. She realizes that in a very short period of time, she had adopted him into her every way of thinking, breathing, being. 

 

“Cassian—” she says, but then she stops.

 

Cassian, she thinks,  _ I’m _ here, but she doesn’t know how to say it. It is so desperately true and so vulnerable and new, to want someone to need her. To want someone to need her because she needed him, because the world was new now and she could see something in him that she wanted to learn, and something in him she wanted to keep safe, and something in him she didn’t want to have to be without. 

 

She doesn’t know how to say all of those things in one, and she’s terrified of how much she  _ wants _ that to be enough, so she just looks at him, unblinking, unwavering, her hand halfway to his shoulder, her breath frozen somewhere in the now-tense air between them, the room feeling like nothing existed outside of the minimal beautiful space that they both miraculously inhabited. 

 

They hold each other’s eyes for  _ moments _ , and it’s almost something— _ almost _ something, almost something, something enough to keep and drag with her and refuse to see end—until his jaw tightens again and he looks at the ground.

 

She sighs.

 

There is still such tension, but Cassian holds on to his grief and guilt like a sword pointed at his own chest, and she is only accustomed to pointing it viciously at others.

 

“Would you rather be dead?” 

 

Immediately the air shifts. 

 

It is demonstrably the wrong thing to say. It is catastrophic because of the way her lips form it—she is so  _ angry _ , by nature, so bitter and self-centered especially when she is afraid, that it comes across in a way she didn’t want it to, but that Cassian can only accept as intention. 

 

Cassian shoves off the medical bed he’d been sitting on in an instant—he is out of the room before Jyn can stumble over enough words to make him stay.

 

* * *

 

 

Cassian is not used to this particular kind of survivor’s guilt.

 

He has been doing a lot of light busywork since they got back, since him and Jyn had fought, because he feels so useless doing nothing and he’s not cleared for any sort of field work yet.

 

He has had people he was working with die before. Some of them could have even been prevented, if he’d been smarter or faster or sharper—but there had never before been an instance where there was no particular reason for him to be alive.

 

He was too valuable to send on suicide missions, he supposed, so he’d never had the experience. 

 

The thing about deaths, in a war, is that they are quantifiable. A mission that is sure to lose five people, but also sure to gain enough information or resources to help save a hundred, and you have twenty people to spare...it is hardly rocket science. 

 

A life lost deserves respect, but it has a purpose that you can tell their loved ones. 

 

Him being alive—instead of Chirrut and Baze, instead of K-2—fits in no foreseeable equation. 

 

And yes, there are few loved ones to explain it to. Those who went on a rouge, unsanctioned suicide mission did not do so because they had a wife or husband on base that they loved very dearly. And yes, the ones that did have to know, did not ask him why he was alive and they were not.

 

And yes, when he took a deep breath, when he felt his hands run across something particularly familiar, particularly like  _ safety _ and  _ home _ and what he wanted, in his heart, to keep, to fight for...he was glad he wasn’t dead.

 

It was just that he was only now learning to fight for something other than a cause, and he is missing the person who taught him.  
  


* * *

 

He would not have chosen Jyn.

 

Not for a mission, not for a friend. 

 

He was raised since very young to believe that, under no uncertain terms, selfishness was death. Just one person with their own interests, their own fears, could ruin an entire mission, could ruin the entire cause. It was a particular type of attitude that wasn’t so cult-like, so empire-like, that it was enforced in law—you could still date, you could still love, you could still want to hug your mother one last time.

 

But if you acted in a way that assured it, if you fought tooth and nail for that instead of the cause, then what  _ were _ you? 

 

And it is easy not to value your own needs above the cause when you have so very little of them. His family died when he was six—who was there left to protect, who was there left to cry out for, to run to instead of towards a current of assured death?

 

Jyn’s entire life has been selfish.

 

Jyn has fought tooth and nail for a father who almost certainly was building a weapon to kill them all, although she fought tooth and nail against that lie too. Jyn had seen one thing  that nobody else would—that no one told her to fight for, that no one told her was right, but that she believed was true, that she knew was the only way to keep herself alive—and she fought for it.

 

She fought for it, but she saved that little girl. 

 

She fought for it, but something in her eyes locked, and something in her hands followed his. 

 

* * *

 

 

Jyn is learning humility the hard way.

 

Many times in her career of trying to find her father, she’d pissed someone off enough to get in trouble, and pissed the person who was telling her she was in trouble off enough to explain to her, in no uncertain terms, how flawed she was.

 

Her biggest flaw at the time was not listening to criticism, an act she regrets now, because she figures humility is a bit like a muscle, and she’s never used hers enough for it to be strong enough to lift the weight of doing every single busy-work gofer job the Alliance had to offer, because although yes, she got them the Death Star plans, she was still a liability in every other single way.

 

She tries so hard. 

 

She really, really does.

 

There is just something so  _ frustrating _ about the juxtaposition of having to organize their stocks at the same time she is being congratulated and thanked for her tenacity and bravery.

 

There is also something frustrating about grieving for a father she’d only known again for forty-five seconds and a hologram, as well as friends she’d only known for a week but was willing to die for, as well as the fact that though she’d tried she hadn’t spoken to Cassian in weeks, either, and it all just. Ground.

 

It ground down her teeth because she clenched her jaw so tightly in order to stop herself biting out something she’d regret from instinct when someone told her to do something she thought was pointless. It ground at her fingertips when she held her arm tightly, with pointed fingernails, just so that the pain of it took her away from being on the platform laying over her father’s body, from watching Cassian fall and look so broken and small on the ground below her. 

 

It ground at her head, how at every turn she hoped that Cassian was going to be there, so they could talk, argue, whatever, it ground at her heart how much she feared that he would be.

 

It all just  _ ground _ , so painfully and slowly, that after the Captain who gave her orders to sort and catalogue the bacta supply left, she kicks a free standing box of it with such force that it sounds across the room like a kettle bell. 

 

“ _ Stupid _ ,” she says, although nothing is. It is important work. It is important to flex this brand-new muscle of humility. 

 

“Just— _ tiresome _ ,” she says. She kicks it again. “And  _ pointless _ . And  _ wasteful _ .”

 

“What has that bacta done to you?” 

 

In one single moment, breathless. 

 

In another, a sort of blinding rage—the bacta has done nothing to her. Cassian has left her alone to try and adjust to a new life with no one left over from the old one after he said that it was home and that meant that you stuck around _ ,  _ all in thanks for the fact that she  _ saved his life _ .

 

“Cassian,” says Jyn, the name containing every single emotion she’d felt for the past few weeks all bundled up unto one little pointed blaster bolt of a name.

 

“They’ve made you busy, yes?” 

 

“You’ve been awfully busy yourself,” says Jyn. She sets both her jaw and the tone of the conversation in anger—her default, go to, safe sort of emotion when it was too hard to figure all of the other ones out.

 

“You’re angry at me.”

 

He doesn’t say it incredulously. If anything, he sounds like he had expected it.

 

“I don’t know,” says Jyn, not lying. She marks a count on her pad—there are a few dozen less packs of bacta left than the last time she counted it.

 

“I’m not angry at you anymore,” says Cassian. “If that helps. I could change that, though.” 

 

He most certainly could.

 

Jyn knows this.

 

Jyn needs to realize this better than she is currently. All this counting of bacta had trained her for this exact moment where she needed to be humble the most.

 

She puts down her pad and looks back at him—and that is where it all becomes easier. Not natural, maybe, but easier. She sees his face, lined and scarred a little, tired and cautious, and she’s once again so consumed with the gratefulness that he’s  _ alive _ , that she was able to cling to him, even if she’d never been able to cling to anyone before, that she knows she wants to save him again, not from death, but from the bitter-angry-grief that makes her want to punch him.

 

Her nose burns, she shakes her head.

 

“I’m not mad at you,” she says. “I’m sorry that I sounded like I was. I’m not.” 

 

“I appreciate that,” says Cassian, a bit of a lilting, cautious laugh to his voice.

 

“Thank you for not being mad at me,” she says.

 

“You’re welcome,” says Cassian. And then, “I’m glad that you’re alive. I’m glad that we’re alive. I’m glad I’m here with you.” 

 

“I wasn’t sure,” says Jyn. Her nose burns so awfully, and her cheeks are red and her eyes are wet. “You didn’t act like you were.” 

 

She is unaware that every time they speak the step ever closer to each other, that the gap between them becomes steps less until it’s hardly anything, until it’s her and him, both of their faults and failings and shortcomings, and both of them choosing each other. 

 

“I’m not used to being happy for myself,” says Cassian. 

 

This is true. Jyn knows this is true, because she knows  _ him _ . Maybe not every detail of him or his past or his life, but she knows this to be the core of him—the unceasing, unwavering unselfishness of him, a part of him that he could manage better but Jyn is sure he could never change.

 

A part of him that she wants to know how to do herself.

 

“You should be,” says Jyn. She swallows, lifts her chin up. She says it with conviction. It isn’t sappiness that drives her to say it—it’s simple truth. “You should.” 

 

“I am learning,” says Cassian, and then he takes his hand and places it on her cheek, not to direct her face towards him or pull her closer, but just to have it there.  _ Thanks to you _ is so heavily implied by the fact that their noses almost touch—it’s the sort of less-than-spoken language that they both understand in each other. 

 

“I haven’t seen you in weeks,” she says, but she doesn’t move away, or force her face away from Cassian’s hand.

 

“I know,” says Cassian, with a tilt of his head. There is so much of him that is earnest and wanting, beneath all the grump and general stress. “I’m sorry.” 

 

“I’ve counted so much  _ bloody _ bacta I feel like my eyes have crossed,” says Jyn, because his apology is enough.

 

“You’re wasted here,” says Cassian, in a way that is sarcastic and teasing and that Jyn only allows because they both know it is actually true. She gives him a little shove that does not push him all the way back and is the adulthood equivalent of sticking out her tongue at him, and then—

 

“Thank you. For believing me.” 

 

Cassian nods slightly.

 

“Thank you for saving my life.”

 

“Could you stop trying to one-up me? Like, just for a second? I’m trying to be genuine.” 

 

Cassian smiles. He has a lovely, kind, infectious, wicked as all hell smile, and he barely uses it. He pulls her face closer to his, sweeps her escaped hair away,  and presses his lips against her forehead. 

 

His lips still pressed there, his hand still on her cheek, he smiles again.

 

“No.” 


End file.
